Watching former world champions and/or Olympic-medallists Kurt Browning, Elvis Stojko and Patrick Chan glide along Blanshard Street before nearly 7,000 fans in Stars on Ice on Tuesday night was a striking reminder that sa国际传媒’s greatest days in skating are in the past.
That’s what the highly appreciative near-capacity Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre crowd came out for and craved. But on the current competitive level, it doesn’t mask but only accentuates that Canadian skating now seems to be all about the golden glow of what was, not what’s ahead — which doesn’t seem like much for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. That after being held off the figure-skating podium at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. That would have been unthinkable just a few years previous when a capacity crowd at the Memorial Centre gave a rapturous standing ovation when the 2018 Stars on Ice closed with the Canadian gold-medallist team from earlier that year in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics skated to Fields of Gold by Sting. It was an unforgettable moment and sent shivers up the spine of even the most jaded. But Chan, Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir, Kaetyln Osmond, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford are now retired from competitive skating and the cupboard left behind appears empty.
“It’s a bitter question for me to answer because I am no longer in the trenches,” said Browning, 56, prior to his last career show at the Memorial Centre on Tuesday in Stars on Ice.
“In the past, there’s always been somebody who broke through to carry the momentum forward … that one person to lock on to for the future.”
It was Brian Orser who started it off in the modern era with his Battle of the Brians home-nation silver medal in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, followed in turn by Browning’s four world championships and then by Olympic-medallists Elvis Stojko, Jeffrey Buttle and Patrick Chan. There was always that next guy to carry the torch.
“I don’t have the answer,” said Browning.
“I do know it will be a while until sa国际传媒 is threatening for gold again.”
Two-time Olympic silver-medallist and three-time world-champion Stojko, 51, touched on the issue last year in Victoria during Stars on Ice: “Pyeongchang was the pinnacle for us. sa国际传媒 can rebound [from Beijing] but it’s going to take a while. There is going to be a gap. We’re seeing a lot of sign-ups of young skaters. But it’s going to take eight to 10 years, however. It’s going to be hard. We have to allow the process to grow.”
The 2030 Winter Olympics have not even been awarded yet. But that’s likely the next time there will be a Canadian figure-skater on the Games podium, but even that is far from assured. But that’s a problem for the future. Island fans wrapped themselves in the glorious past of Canadian skating Tuesday night at the Memorial Centre and were happy to do so in waving a fond farewell to Browning in another energetic and elegant production of Stars on Ice.
